Thursday, August 20, 2009

The task ahead

Rizzo has a long way to go to build the organization. The Nationals have only four professional scouts, the front office is bare, they must get a Latin American program up and running and they need to work on the development group.

It's clear the way the Lerners handled the Rizzo hiring that they are fair and committed to allowing the reconstruction of the organization. They want Zimmerman and Morgan and Strasburg to be the faces of the franchise.

If the Lerners are only now committed to reconstructing the organization, what have they been doing since 2006?

Update: I was trying to figure out how many full-time scouts a MLB team usually carries. The best information I could find was for the Twins, which may be a scout-heavy team. As of the 2008 season, the Twins had 13 full-time domestic scouts (advance, minor league, and amateur). There would also be additional part-time scouts, foreign scouts, etc.

I think names of scouts are listed in the team media guides. It wouldn't be that hard to compare the Nats as of February 2009 with the other teams.

4 comments:

While it's true that the names of scouts can certainly be listed in team media guides, I don't think that's required. So perusing team media guides would not seem to be the best way to determine the extent of each team's scouting staff. Is that how Gammons came up with his number of four for the Nats?

Certainly, nothing is required to be in a media guide. The entire enterprise is a courtesy.

As I stated above, in addition to full-time scouts, a team employs numerous part-time scouts, both domestic and foreign. The number of scouts listed in a media guide would be nothing more than a rough yardstick by which to measure the Nationals' commitment.

The number four is merely another bit of information that illuminates the challenge ahead for Rizzo and emphasizes a longstanding question regarding how the Lerners are running the team.

The Nationals list no scouts in their media guide, and haven't in any of the media guides I have going back to 2007. They list the scouting director (Dana Brown), coordinator of advance scouting (Erick Dalton) and scouting assistant (Reed Dunn). Are these the three full-time scouts Gammons references? If so, then he's nothing but a clueless tool, because obviously the team has many more scouts than this. What does he mean by "full time scout" anyway? Works 52 weeks a year, with benefits? If that's true, then teams with all these full time scouts must have a lot of guys sitting around drawing pay during the winter months when not much amateur baseball is being played. Or, more likely the other teams are listing all the guys who do scouting for them in the media guide, even though they're not full time employess. Clearly the Nats aren't doing that.